ABSTRACT
Peru has a long history of military interference in politics. Most of the nineteenth century was marked by a succession of coups d’état in which military strongmen seized power. For its part, the twentieth century was characterised by different military interventions whose aim was to ‘stabilise’ the country in favour of conservative interests, in a context of serious political conflict. The end of the last military dictatorship in 1980 was followed by two decades of internal armed conflict and the military-backed autocratic and corrupt populism under Fujimori. At the end of the twentieth century, the Peruvian armed forces had emerged from their political dealings rather worse for wear and with their legitimacy questioned. To issues relating to human rights violations during counter-insurgency operations were added their support for an authoritarian government and the involvement in serious corruption. From 2001 to 2015, there was a fair amount of stability in the country, owing to which the armed forces achieved their highest level of professionalisation and built a new identity and established new objectives on the basis of a new generation of officers. Starting in 2016, however, an increasingly more polarised situation drove the civilian leaders and a conservative sector of retired servicemen to press the military ‘to speak out’ and in which, given the fragility of the country’s democratic institutions, they feel, in a way, ‘obliged’ to settle, by action or omission, disputes between political actors.
